01 — What is Design Ethnography?
Over the next 15 days, I will dive deep into design ethnography — what it is, why to do it, and a step-by-step breakdown for designers, innovators strategists wanting to create human-centered solutions. Every day, I will publish one atomic essay on the topic, all contributing toward a more comprehensive guide, starting with this brief introduction.
What is ethnography?
Ethnography is a social sciences research method that is used to understand people and cultures in context. It is mainly a qualitative method but can employ quantitative aspects as well. People commonly understand this as in-depth interviews with participants (or users), but it’s more than that. Any research study with primary data collection looking into the human condition reflexively can be ethnographic.
What is design ethnography?
In the context of design, ethnography involves understanding people in cultures to make better products, services, solutions, systems, and futures that are intuitive, embedded in context and useful (for e.g, user interviews as part of the UX research process).
Why am I writing about this topic?
I have planned and executed over 10 ethnographic studies of different scopes and scales and want to share my learnings with fellow design and innovation researchers. I’m still learning in which contexts ethnography would be most useful, and hope to explore that through this series. Ultimately, learning just a method is not as valuable as the context in which it is used.
Throughout this series on design ethnography, I hope to cover…
- When to use ethnography as a UX and service designer and innovation strategist
- How ethnography complements other research methods commonly used in design and innovation work,
- Examples of interesting ethnographic explorations,
- The nitty-gritty details of designing an ethnographic study
- And finally, how to deliver value using this method.
Read this post and more on my Typeshare Social Blog
